Many companies use credit insurance to help them manage trading risks and grow their business. They employ it to improve efficiency by streamlining their processes around the handling of non-payments, to create a safety net when offering customer credit and to gain high quality business intelligence.
But how do they actually employ credit insurance in practice? Here’s a step-by-step guide on how you can make the most of your credit insurance policy.
Get high quality intelligence on customer and prospect creditworthiness
Draw on the expertise of your credit insurer to get a detailed risk assessment of each of your customers as well as insights on the sectors and countries in which they operate. You can use this information, along with your own insights and due diligence to establish a credit limit and payment terms for each of your customers. At Atradius, we are continuously monitoring the creditworthiness of all the cover we provide so if the risk situation changes, we will let you know.
Improve the efficiency of your credit management processes
Employing people – internally or externally – to monitor your invoices and chase any that are overdue costs time and money. However, you can automate many of these processes through your credit insurance policy. With an Atradius policy you can use our APIs to integrate with your existing credit management processes to set credit limits for trade, agree payments terms that are in line with the policy conditions and report any payments that are overdue. We also provide handy tools such as our on-line portal – Atrium - for all day-to-day interactions with us as well as a 24/7 insight into your portfolio.
How to use credit insurance to nurture trade and grow your business
Trade credit insurance is a valuable tool when you are considering expanding within your current markets or looking to move into new markets. It enables you to leverage the knowledge and insights of your credit insurer into both the creditworthiness of potential new customers and the markets in which they operate.
At Atradius, for example, we have information on millions of businesses throughout the world and provide you with handy tools for free that can help you profile potential new customers with good credit scores. This will help you engage with prospects with more confidence and offer credit to gain a competitive advantage in areas where you may have previously been more risk averse.
Using trade credit insurance to underpin your business relationships
Many of our customers tell us that their credit insurance policies help to support their wider business relationships. For example, some customers use credit insurance to support their applications for finance and others have told us they have secured more favourable terms
How credit insurance works when making a claim
Making a claim and triggering a debt collection with Atradius is straightforward. You just alert us via your online account in our portal, Atrium, and follow the prompts to provide details of all outstanding invoices. This will also trigger a debt collection – which is included as part of your policy. Our professional debt collection colleagues are often able to collect the debt, however in the event we have not collected your overdue payments by the agreed date (typically 30 days for an insolvency and 180 days for a defaulted payment), we will pay a claim (usually up to 90% of the invoice amount).
